Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Inflation - the unknown tax with song Where were you when the world went mad by the Liberty Bard
This is how they do it-with a half-hidden semi-obscured little-understood insiduous tax called inflation. Would we all be so quick to support our wars of aggression if they increased our tax rates now to pay for it? I don't think so, it's much easier to push the costs down to our children and grandchildren by borrowing and then inflating the debt away through inflationary policies. Unfortunately, that inflation also rises the prices of everything for the rest of us. #ENDTHEFED
KEEPING IT REAL - article written by Jim Quinn www.theburningplatform.com
34 comments
“One only needs to reflect on the dramatic decline in the value of the dollar that has taken place since the Fed was established in 1913. The goods and services you could buy for $1.00 in 1913 now cost nearly $21.00. Another way to look at this is from the perspective of the purchasing power of the dollar itself. It has fallen to less than $0.05 of its 1913 value. We might say that the government and its banking cartel have together stolen $0.95 of every dollar as they have pursued a relentlessly inflationary policy.” - Ron Paul – End the Fed
The BLS reported the CPI this morning. They tell me that inflation is well contained and has only risen by 1.2% in the past twelve months. Our beloved Federal Reserve chairman is worried inflation is too low. It is fascinating that the only people worried about inflation being too low are Ivy League educated economists and bankers whose wealth depends upon the middle class sinking further into poverty. As a person who lives in the real world, I can honestly say I like it when the things I need to buy cost less today than they did last year. When did inflation become a good thing for the average American? Our country was somehow able to grow from a fledgling new country to a world power in just over a century while experiencing mild deflation, except during times of war. The fallacy that inflation is beneficial to the common man has been peddled by bankers since 1971 when Nixon and his cronies closed the gold window and unleashed the inflationary boogeyman in the form of feckless politicians, captured Keynesian academics, and greedy soulless bankers.
It is no coincidence inflation accelerated the moment politicians, academics and bankers were unleashed to spend your money at will in order to obtain votes, Nobel prizes in economics, and ill-gotten obscene levels of wealth. David Stockman described Nixon’s dreadful sellout of the American people in his brilliant new book:
“Nixon’s estimable free market advisors who gathered at the Camp David weekend were to an astonishing degree clueless as to the consequences of their recommendation to close the gold window and float the dollar. In their wildest imaginations they did not foresee that this would unhinge the monetary and financial nervous system of capitalism. They had no premonition at all that it would pave the way for a forty-year storm of financialization and a debt-besotted symbiosis between central bankers possessed by delusions of grandeur and private gamblers intoxicated with visions of delirious wealth.” -David Stockman – The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America
The USD has lost 83% of its purchasing power since 1971. The moment Nixon began playing politics with the USD and bullied the Federal Reserve Chairman into pumping up the money supply prior to the 1972 election, the inflation genie got out of the bottle and led to the miserable stagflation of the 1970′s. It took extreme measures by Paul Volcker to get it back under control in the early 1980′s. Since Volcker we’ve had nothing but academics and toadies who have chosen to change the definition of inflation in order to mislead the average American regarding how badly they are getting screwed. Every refinement, tweak, adjustment, or revision to the calculation of CPI has been designed to produce a lower figure. Why control inflation when you can just change the calculation to suit your purposes?
Over the proceeding decades, the BLS has sliced and diced the CPI in such a way that they can make it say whatever TPTB want it to say. They need to keep the mushrooms (you) in the dark regarding your standard of living deteriorating, while the beneficiaries of inflation (bankers, politicians) see their standard of living soaring. They have made hedonistic “adjustments”, quality “adjustments”, substitution “adjustments” and geometric weighting “adjustments”, all with the sole purpose to reduce the level reported to the American people on a monthly basis.
CPI was supposed to measure a common basket of goods and services that Americans needed to purchase in order to live their lives. If the price for this basket rose, you had inflation. If the price for this basket fell, you had deflation. The politicians, academics, bankers and government bureaucrats decided if the price of steak went up by 10%, you would switch to chicken, therefore the price of steak did not go up by 10%. They decided if the price of a new car went up 5%, but you now had heated seats, the price didn’t really go up 5%. They now want to change to a chained CPI, which will further depress the reported figure. CPI no longer represents the increase in price of goods and services you need to live your day to day life.
Even the composition of the index doesn’t match the true cost picture for the average American. Somehow they bury the energy component within multiple categories and have the gall to argue that energy costs only comprise 9.6% of the average American expense budget. Tell that to the suburban two worker family that drives 30,000 miles per year and has to heat and cool a 2,000 square foot home. I doubt that too many families only spend 7% of their money on medical care. Housing accounts for 41% of the CPI calculation, but it is again a made up calculation called owner’s equivalent rent. Only an Ivy League economist could explain the calculation. The fact that home prices have risen by 12%, rents have risen by 4% and mortgage rates have risen from 3.25% to 4.5% in the last year somehow results in a 2.4% annual rate of inflation for housing.
If you have the feeling your standard of living has been falling for the last few decades even though your owners tell you the economy is expanding, inflation is contained, unemployment is falling, the stock market is rising, and consumer spending is growing, then you might be smarter than a 5th grader. The financial elite ruling class are counting on the dreadful public education system, along with their mainstream corporate media propaganda arms, to keep the techno-distracted math challenged masses from understanding how the financialization of the country has resulted in their demise.
Being a skeptical sort, I decided to verify the accuracy of the CPI propaganda issued by the Bureau of Lies and Scams. The combination of the internet and memories from my youth provide a powerful and accurate assessment about the truthfulness of our government. I decided to create a chart of goods and services that average Americans have spent their hard earned wages on for decades. In a matter of minutes I was able to obtain prices from 1971 for various items common to most people. I was eight years old in 1971, being raised in a middle class one earner household on the salary of a truck driver. The chart below provides the proof the government CPI data is a bad joke and the American people are the butt of that joke.
| Category | 1971 | 2013 | % Change | |
| Average Price of New Car | $3,470 | $31,252 | 800.6% | |
| Average Price of New Home | $26,000 | $245,800 | 845.4% | |
| Gallon of Gasoline | $0.36 | $3.50 | 872.2% | |
| Natural Gas | $0.35 | $4.00 | 1042.9% | |
| Loaf of Bread | $0.20 | $2.20 | 1000.0% | |
| Sirloin Steak per pound | $1.19 | $7.00 | 488.2% | |
| Dozen Eggs | $0.25 | $1.90 | 660.0% | |
| Box of cereal 12 oz | $0.36 | $3.50 | 872.2% | |
| Pack of Cigarettes | $0.32 | $6.00 | 1775.0% | |
| College Tuition – Private | $1,832 | $30,094 | 1542.7% | |
| Monthly Rent | $150 | $1,073 | 615.3% | |
| Baseball ticket – Phila | $2 | $23 | 1050.0% | |
| Movie ticket | $1.50 | $9.00 | 500.0% | |
| Maximum Social Security Tax | $406 | $8,950 | 2104.4% | |
| Median Household Income | $9,028 | $51,017 | 465.1% | |
| Median wage per worker | $6,497 | $27,519 | 323.6% | |
| Average Hourly Earnings | $3.60 | $20.31 | 464.2% | |
| CPI | 40.5 | 232.0 | 472.8% | |
| Consumer Credit Outstanding (tril.) | $0.14 | $3.07 | 2092.9% | |
| Mortgage Debt Outstanding (tril.) | $0.51 | $13.18 | 2484.3% | |
The BLS tells me the CPI has risen by 473% since 1971. The very same agency also tells me average hourly earnings have risen by 464% since 1971. This means the average worker is earning less than they did in 1971 in real terms. The median wage per worker has lagged CPI dramatically, as the averages have been skewed by those making outrageous compensation in the financial world. Median household income has barely kept pace with inflation even though households were forced to send both parents into the workforce, with the expected consequences of higher divorce rates and children left to fend for themselves or be raised by strangers.
By the government’s own measures, the average American’s standard of living has fallen since 1971. But, we also know the government has been manipulating the CPI figure lower since the mid-1980′s. After examining the true cost increases for housing, transportation, energy, food, education and entertainment, you would have to be brain dead or an Ivy League economist to believe inflation since 1971 has only been 473%. If home prices and car prices are 800% higher, while the energy needed to power and heat them are 900% to 1,000% higher, and the cost of food is 500% to 1,000% higher, how could the CPI only be 473% higher?
There are far more people going to college today than in 1971. With college tuition 1,500% higher, how can this not be reflected in the CPI? It certainly isn’t because the education is better. Statistics show the uneducated poor are more likely to smoke. Lucky for them, cigarette prices have risen at a rate of 4 times CPI due to the government taxing the crap out of them to fund their various taxpayer boondoggles. Inflation always hurts the poor and enriches the peddlers of debt.
My dad would take me to the brand new Veterans Stadium (built for $50 million in 1971) to see the Phillies in the early 1970′s. He paid $2.00 for a general admission seat and kids got in for 50 cents. We would buy a bag of soft pretzels outside the stadium and bring them into the park. We’d get a hot dog and soda for another $1. The entire outing to see a baseball game was about $5. Today, if I wanted to bring my family of five to a Phillies game at Citizen Bank Park (built for $458 million and paid for by the taxpayer) the lowest cost for the outing would be about $200. In 1971, you could spend a vacation week at the Jersey shore for $200. Now it gets you 3 hours of watching spoiled millionaires playing a child’s game while sitting with a bunch of foul mouthed drunks.
I also found it fascinating that the most regressive tax on earth, the Social Security tax, which hammers the poor and middle class while leaving the rich virtually unscathed has gone up by 2,100% since 1971. The rate in 1971 was 5.2% and the maximum salary level was $7,800. Today, the rate is 7.65% and the maximum level is $113,700. This increased cost for every middle class American is not factored into the inflation figures. Why would the government need to increase the maximum taxable wages by 1,500% when wages have gone up by less than 500%? The hard working truck driver bears the full impact, while Jamie Dimon not so much.
So now that I’ve proved beyond a shadow of a doubt the prices of everything we need to live have far outpaced our wages and the patently false drivel published by the BLS and parroted by the MSM, what are the implications? Well that is an easy one and is summed up by the last two entries in the chart. The average American has been lured into $16 trillion of debt over the last forty years in a pathetic attempt to keep up with the Joneses. Consumer credit (credit cards, auto loans, student loans) has gone up by 2,100% and mortgage debt has gone up by 2,500%. The American people have been sold a false lifestyle dream built on easy credit by evil bankers and Madison Avenue PR maggots.
There are those who would blame the people who have chosen to live far beyond their means. They have a point. The American people certainly haven’t shown a penchant for delayed gratification, saving for the future, or consuming less than they produce. But it takes two to tango and the lead in this dance of debt has been and continues to be the Federal Reserve and their Wall Street bank owners. It’s always reasonable to ask – Who benefits? – when trying to figure out why something has happened over time. Did the American people benefit by increasing the debt owed to Wall Street banks from $650 billion in 1971 to $16.25 trillion today? I don’t think so, based upon the visible deterioration I am witnessing in my suburban paradise.
The financialization of America; where Wall Street con artists,shysters and swindlers rake in billions for shuffling paper and making risky casino bets; mega-corporations ship blue collar middle class jobs to Asia in an all out effort to increase quarterly profits; politicians spend future generations into the poor house in order to get re-elected; and the Federal Reserve purposefully creates monetary inflation to prop up the corrupt system; has systematically destroyed the working middle class and created generations of debt slaves. The American people have been foolish, infantile, and easily duped. But it is clear to me who the real culprits in our long downward spiral have been. Lord Acton stated the obvious, many years ago:
“The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.” ― John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
www.youtube.com/jenklefritz
The Man They Still Hate by Joseph Sobran - song by the Liberty Bard
The Man They Still Hate
December 2, 1999
![[Breaker
quote: The eternally unfashionable]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tDJz6oqKzA5-8wQNX2mACx9jeyP5-8EuF_jQPWHQj8ESx_Cbg9CNBFAxnMoXGOUJzjwtt64fUkCS2S1sb6qpEzJInBRLlN-NIOvYwUIge_GiLmJouedj7a743qtT0v=s0-d)
Joseph Sobran
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Welcome to the Narcissistic Nanny State by the Liberty Bard
The Redistribution of Freedom
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called the right to be left alone the "most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by a free people." It would even be fair to say that without the right to be left alone no other rights exist.
Amendments one through ten of the Bill of Rights are essentially an enumeration of the ways that government is obligated to leave people alone. This is most explicitly true of the First Amendment which definitively sums up areas of human life into which government under no circumstance may trespass on.
Unlike other amendments, the territory that the First Amendment deals with is intellectual and spiritual, the world of ideas, the realm of faith and the defining right of political advocacy. The freedoms of the mind, heart and voice are the most essential of freedoms because they free us to be individuals. They allow us to have our own values. Without these freedoms, no society is free.
Those who sought to undermine these "Freedoms from Government" did so by offering alternative "Freedoms of Government." Countering the Founding Fathers' DMZ's of self-determination, they promised freedom from social problems. A second Bill of Rights would offer the freedom from fear and want. Instead of a liberation from government, the new rights would trade social benefits for freedoms. A right would not mean a zone of freedom from the government, but a government entitlement.
The Orwellian inversion of rights has meant that civil rights perversely take away rights. No sooner is a right created than it is used to deprive other people of their rights. Instead of rights freeing people from government repression, they act as a means of government repression. Freedom is treated as a limited commodity which, like wealth, must be redistributed to achieve maximum social justice.
The right to be left alone, freedom of speech and conscience, have taken a back seat to the redistribution of freedom. Government rights violate individual rights by compelling everyone to participate in the process of distributing entitlements.
A wedding photographer in New Mexico was ordered by a court to participate in a gay ceremony violating both her First Amendment rights to Freedom of Religion as a Christian and her right to Freedom of Speech as an artist. A baker in Colorado was ordered to make a gay wedding cake or face penalties ranging from fines to a year in prison. The ACLU is after even bigger game suing Catholic hospitals for not engaging in abortion contending that patients are being deprived of their rights.
The fundamental issue in all these cases is whether our rights are defined by the ability to be left alone or by the opposing ability to compel others to do what we want them to. Is the right to force someone else to participate in your wedding or perform your abortion more compelling than the right to opt out of being forced to engage in behaviors that violate your deepest religious convictions?
America is a nation founded by religious dissenters. Its founding documents, from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution and its Bill of Rights make the moral case for dissent. The Declaration of Independence begins by setting out a moral case for separation, for the divorce of authority, based on the moral principle of individual freedom. It makes government conditional on liberty, rather than making liberty conditional on government.
Today the national establishment is intolerant of dissent. It traps the current of freedom in dams of entitlements. It pits the right to be against the right to receive and makes certain that the right to receive, not only the property of others, but their very conscience, mind and liberty, always wins out.
The United States is following the European course of rendering the distinction between the state and the church irrelevant by making the state into the church and mandating that everyone worship it. As in 19th century Europe, deliberate clashes are being stirred up between the values of the state and religious values for the purpose of demonstrating that the values of the state are supreme.
The expansion of state power is rapidly becoming limitless. The old legal justifications that linked Federal intervention in civil rights to interstate commerce and public accommodation have given way to a redefinition of any and all establishments as public accommodations. Courts argue that once an individual begins to sell a product or service, he loses access to all his Constitutional freedoms.
The core issue transcends the hot button social issues such as gay marriage and abortion embraced by the elites of a permissive society and addresses the deeper inversion of rights that is at the heart of the problem.
Reproductive rights and gay rights activists both campaigned to be left alone. There are still gay protests with placards arguing that their marriages are no one else's business and pro-abortion rallies demanding that politicians stay out of the bedroom. But if the marriage of Adam and Steve shouldn't be at the disposal of Harry and Julie, why should Harry's bakery and Julie's talent be at the disposal of Adam and Steve? If the government should stay out of the bedroom, then why must it dive into the bedroom to compel the owners of companies like Hobby Lobby to subsidize violations of their faith?
Cases like these show that the issue is not rights, but control. If the only way to obtain what you call your rights is by compelling someone else to give up theirs then what you are really demanding is not a right, but a means of imposing your values and your convictions on someone else. And that is not a matter of civil rights. It is an ideological and religious war with government siding with whoever has the most money to invest in strategic campaign contributions for the culture war.
Individual rights exist in the empty spaces that government is forced out of. Government rights however do not exist until everyone is forced to provide them. That is true of the redistribution of wealth and property, but it is even truer of the redistribution of freedom and the confiscation of conscience.
Whatever right government has to the seizure of wealth, it has none to the seizure of conscience. If there is any place that the government has no right to intrude, not in the name of social justice or political correctness or the progressive utopia awaiting us on the other side of the regulatory mirror, it is the territories of the First Amendment, sacred not only in idea, but also in practice.
There can be no faith, no ideas and no individuality without the First Amendment. Without the right to be left alone in your beliefs, your values and your convictions, there can be no other rights and the very notion of rights, no matter how often it is used to describe everything from free health care to gay marriage, cannot exist.
And it is into this sacred territory that the judicial activists of gay marriage have dared to intrude.
Rights can either be defined by the virtue of the individual in his liberty or the virtue of the government in its authoritarianism. But it cannot be defined by both. Either you have the right to be free or you have the right to the property and the service of another human being. The choice is the fundamental one between freedom and slavery.
Social justice denies the virtue of freedom, it rejects the possibility of self-determination without external intervention, it dismisses the idea that people can be free without a system of redistributing freedom from the oppressors to the oppressed so that the oppressed become the new oppressors. It rejects any alternative to entitlements as entitlement and any alternative to privilege as privilege.
The moral argument for freedom is the self-organizing principle of individuals. The moral argument for compulsion is that the system is superior to individuals. The left has chosen central planning in human rights as it has in every other area of life. It believes with the paradoxical perversity of doublethink that freedom can only come from government because only a central authority is qualified to provide the equal distribution of freedom within carefully planned limits.
This abrogation of freedom is the logical end result of the left's entire pattern of reasoning which rejects the individual for the collective, the working man for the planner and the people for the ideological expert. These forms of repression are expressions of its rotten notion that the left may do anything and everything in the name of freedom except actually allow the people to be free.
Without the right to be left alone, there are no other individual rights. Without individual rights, there is no such thing as a free society.
Every group is sooner or later faced with choosing whether it wants to win a final conclusive victory over its enemies or whether it wants to be free. The tyrannical choice is tempting, but it unleashes a cycle of conflict and repression that can only end with extermination. And once that choice is made, the formerly oppressed forfeit all their moral authority as they abandon freedom for tyranny.
Amendments one through ten of the Bill of Rights are essentially an enumeration of the ways that government is obligated to leave people alone. This is most explicitly true of the First Amendment which definitively sums up areas of human life into which government under no circumstance may trespass on.Unlike other amendments, the territory that the First Amendment deals with is intellectual and spiritual, the world of ideas, the realm of faith and the defining right of political advocacy. The freedoms of the mind, heart and voice are the most essential of freedoms because they free us to be individuals. They allow us to have our own values. Without these freedoms, no society is free.
Those who sought to undermine these "Freedoms from Government" did so by offering alternative "Freedoms of Government." Countering the Founding Fathers' DMZ's of self-determination, they promised freedom from social problems. A second Bill of Rights would offer the freedom from fear and want. Instead of a liberation from government, the new rights would trade social benefits for freedoms. A right would not mean a zone of freedom from the government, but a government entitlement.
The Orwellian inversion of rights has meant that civil rights perversely take away rights. No sooner is a right created than it is used to deprive other people of their rights. Instead of rights freeing people from government repression, they act as a means of government repression. Freedom is treated as a limited commodity which, like wealth, must be redistributed to achieve maximum social justice.
The right to be left alone, freedom of speech and conscience, have taken a back seat to the redistribution of freedom. Government rights violate individual rights by compelling everyone to participate in the process of distributing entitlements.
A wedding photographer in New Mexico was ordered by a court to participate in a gay ceremony violating both her First Amendment rights to Freedom of Religion as a Christian and her right to Freedom of Speech as an artist. A baker in Colorado was ordered to make a gay wedding cake or face penalties ranging from fines to a year in prison. The ACLU is after even bigger game suing Catholic hospitals for not engaging in abortion contending that patients are being deprived of their rights.
The fundamental issue in all these cases is whether our rights are defined by the ability to be left alone or by the opposing ability to compel others to do what we want them to. Is the right to force someone else to participate in your wedding or perform your abortion more compelling than the right to opt out of being forced to engage in behaviors that violate your deepest religious convictions?
America is a nation founded by religious dissenters. Its founding documents, from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution and its Bill of Rights make the moral case for dissent. The Declaration of Independence begins by setting out a moral case for separation, for the divorce of authority, based on the moral principle of individual freedom. It makes government conditional on liberty, rather than making liberty conditional on government.
Today the national establishment is intolerant of dissent. It traps the current of freedom in dams of entitlements. It pits the right to be against the right to receive and makes certain that the right to receive, not only the property of others, but their very conscience, mind and liberty, always wins out.
The United States is following the European course of rendering the distinction between the state and the church irrelevant by making the state into the church and mandating that everyone worship it. As in 19th century Europe, deliberate clashes are being stirred up between the values of the state and religious values for the purpose of demonstrating that the values of the state are supreme.
The expansion of state power is rapidly becoming limitless. The old legal justifications that linked Federal intervention in civil rights to interstate commerce and public accommodation have given way to a redefinition of any and all establishments as public accommodations. Courts argue that once an individual begins to sell a product or service, he loses access to all his Constitutional freedoms.
The core issue transcends the hot button social issues such as gay marriage and abortion embraced by the elites of a permissive society and addresses the deeper inversion of rights that is at the heart of the problem.
Cases like these show that the issue is not rights, but control. If the only way to obtain what you call your rights is by compelling someone else to give up theirs then what you are really demanding is not a right, but a means of imposing your values and your convictions on someone else. And that is not a matter of civil rights. It is an ideological and religious war with government siding with whoever has the most money to invest in strategic campaign contributions for the culture war.
Individual rights exist in the empty spaces that government is forced out of. Government rights however do not exist until everyone is forced to provide them. That is true of the redistribution of wealth and property, but it is even truer of the redistribution of freedom and the confiscation of conscience.
Whatever right government has to the seizure of wealth, it has none to the seizure of conscience. If there is any place that the government has no right to intrude, not in the name of social justice or political correctness or the progressive utopia awaiting us on the other side of the regulatory mirror, it is the territories of the First Amendment, sacred not only in idea, but also in practice.
There can be no faith, no ideas and no individuality without the First Amendment. Without the right to be left alone in your beliefs, your values and your convictions, there can be no other rights and the very notion of rights, no matter how often it is used to describe everything from free health care to gay marriage, cannot exist.
And it is into this sacred territory that the judicial activists of gay marriage have dared to intrude.
Rights can either be defined by the virtue of the individual in his liberty or the virtue of the government in its authoritarianism. But it cannot be defined by both. Either you have the right to be free or you have the right to the property and the service of another human being. The choice is the fundamental one between freedom and slavery.
Social justice denies the virtue of freedom, it rejects the possibility of self-determination without external intervention, it dismisses the idea that people can be free without a system of redistributing freedom from the oppressors to the oppressed so that the oppressed become the new oppressors. It rejects any alternative to entitlements as entitlement and any alternative to privilege as privilege.
The moral argument for freedom is the self-organizing principle of individuals. The moral argument for compulsion is that the system is superior to individuals. The left has chosen central planning in human rights as it has in every other area of life. It believes with the paradoxical perversity of doublethink that freedom can only come from government because only a central authority is qualified to provide the equal distribution of freedom within carefully planned limits.
This abrogation of freedom is the logical end result of the left's entire pattern of reasoning which rejects the individual for the collective, the working man for the planner and the people for the ideological expert. These forms of repression are expressions of its rotten notion that the left may do anything and everything in the name of freedom except actually allow the people to be free.Without the right to be left alone, there are no other individual rights. Without individual rights, there is no such thing as a free society.
Every group is sooner or later faced with choosing whether it wants to win a final conclusive victory over its enemies or whether it wants to be free. The tyrannical choice is tempting, but it unleashes a cycle of conflict and repression that can only end with extermination. And once that choice is made, the formerly oppressed forfeit all their moral authority as they abandon freedom for tyranny.
Our Bored President - with song Facts by The Liberty Bard
This article brings up an excellent point. My eight year old son Asher is constantly complaining that he is bored. Unfortunately, our President seems to have the same issue.
December 16, 2013
Our Bored President
By Ed Lasky
Valerie Jarrett, Obama's Rasputin, unwittingly provided us an answer to the question of why the Obama Presidency is such a man-caused disaster.
There are few people who are close to the notoriously insular Barack Obama (a former aide, Neera Tanden, said that "Obama doesn't call anyone, and he's not close to almost anyone. It's stunning that he's in politics, because he really doesn't like people") but Valerie Jarrett is among the select few. They have been friends for decades; she introduced Barack to Michelle; she is a constant presence in the White House, and highly unusual for a White House aide, enjoys her own Secret Service protective detail. And when she described Barack Obama as having been "bored to death his whole life" she helped explained what lies behind a failed presidency.
People familiar with Barack Obama's history realize he has a very low threshold for boredom. This is a trait shared by many millennials: they bore easily, and that character flaw is one reason employers refrain from hiring them. Yet they feel entitled to promotions as a way for others to display gratitude towards them and to give them an ego booster shot. They want to be stimulated and entertained all the time and find work tedious and...boring.
Obama's boredom began early.
When interviewed upon becoming the first black Harvard Law Review President he told the Associated Press, "I'm not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me"; by inference, suburbanites bore him, as well -- and we know how he feels about small-town Americans). Ah...to be jaded and judgmental so early in life and to feel free to spout stereotypes.
Upon graduating law school he went to work for a politically-connected Chicago law firm. But instead of grueling hours spent working on cases or contracts, his colleagues remember him as engaging in less boring and mundane pursuits -- his feet up on his desk, doodling on his memoir on company time. His fellow associates probably did not appreciate his attitude, but the name partners indulged him -- as one suspects he has been indulged throughout his life.
His boredom continued; he quickly grew bored with his state senate job (after all, voting present and relying on the work of others to make a name for oneself can induce ennui). This was a mere steppingstone on the way to greater electoral victory.
He parlayed the state senate job into becoming a United States Senator. How long did it take for that role to bore him? Not long at all, according to Game Change authors John Heilemann and Mark Halperin who wrote of his attitude towards being a Senator just one year:
He was angling for a bigger role.
There was a pattern becoming visible: throughout his career, Barack Obama has found work too mundane, too boring to bother spending time on. He was always looking for the excitement of the next campaign -- to be the star surrounded by adoring crowds and a press eager to sing his praises, a veritable choir. The only time he seemed to be exerting energy was when he was in front of roaring crowds (his political ascent into the stratosphere began at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where he delivered a keynote speech that sent the media swooning; he was in his element, boasting that "I'm Lebron, Baby. I can play on this level. I got some game".)
After that display, it was off to the races and what followed was a narcissist's dream (the Denver faux columns, the faux Presidential seal, the faux presidency).
There is a surfeit of examples of Obama's refusal to take his job with any degree of seriousness.
He has repeatedly refused to meet with economic experts, skipped more than half of his daily intelligence briefings, turned his Cabinet (trumpeted by an obedient media in 2009 as a Lincolnesque "Team of Rivals") into a Team of Idolizers that he almost completely ignores -- both as individuals and as a group; and , if one believes his protestations (a big "if") was out of the loop or, as Charles Krauthammer wrote, oblivious to the NSA, IRS, and AP scandals (as well as Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the vendetta against James Rosen at Fox News -- the list is endless). Of course, the most recent revelation is most revealing: even as he staked his reputation and legacy on his signature "achievement" (he called it his most important initiative) ObamaCare, he reportedly met only once with the official he chose to head the program, Kathleen Sebelius. Talk about being outside the beltway! Actually, that is where he can often be found: on the golf courses, on vacations, in front of adoring crowds, or shaking the money tree at glitzy fundraisers in Hollywood -- a natural environment for a faux president. A President has to set priorities after all.
When Americans were dying in Benghazi, he took the night off to rest for a trip to Las Vegas for a fundraiser to help his re-election efforts; when Americans were engaged in the mission to kill Bin Laden, he went to play cards with his body man. Those events were boring because they were not about him.
So when he has no clue about the real world (there were no "shovel-ready" jobs despite what he said when he pushed for a stimulus bill; "buying insurance" is actually complex -- one suspects he has never had to do it) or about the size of the national debt ( a topic of mirth not concern on the Letterman show ; or how taxes work; or how the economy works -- well, math is boring ; when Paul Ryan revealed how little, if anything, Obama knew about health care reform, entitlements, and the budget, Obama could not even fake a semblance of comprehension (now we know why he does not like news conferences and only appears on fluff shows where he knows he is in a Gotcha Question Free Zone); when he declared that the "private sector is doing fine"; when his advisers discuss the Syrian massacres in front of our Nobel Peace prize-winning President while he blithely ignores them as he spins through his BlackBerry (checking sports scores?) we should no longer be surprised. All those topics are so boring.
Americans should not be surprised that his decision-making has been reduced to a multiple choice sheet handed to him by his ring of advisers or that he is so slow in making decisions ("leading from behind" -- is there any American President who has proclaimed such a doctrine as a guiding principle?) ; or that he outsources decision-making to Vladimir Putin and the mad mullahs of Iran. Learning geopolitics --all those funny sounding names, all those groups, all those national security issues, maps, facts-boring. He outsources the work behind his goal of "fundamentally transforming America" to radicals he appoints and who now have an easy path to confirmation in the wake of Harry Reid's abolishing the venerable filibuster.
Contra to the sycophants who declared him the "smartest president" ever, or a "sort of god," he is not omniscient nor is he particularly bright. However, the flattery and obsequiousness has inflated an already outsized ego. Why would a god find mere mortals of interest? Obama admitted as much when he declared at a high-powered fundraiser that:
No wonder he finds no time for experts and advisers but has plenty of time for pickup basketball games with NBA pros, glittering Hollywood celebrities, private concerts in the East Room of the White House. Everyone and everything else is so...boring. And he has no tolerance...or is actually rude...to people he finds boring . When Republicans and others, even donors hoping for a photo op, try to meet with him he considers it an act of lèse-majesté.
If he were interested in becoming a better president he would be forced to actually work, and he has a severe problem with the concept of work when it involves him and (perhaps) welfare recipients, as well He does not understand why businessmen and professionals would find his declaration that they did not "build that" offensive.
But to him work is boring.
He may be good enough for government work. No wonder he likes Big Government -- where else can someone with his attitude and work ethic rise so high? The administration operates with the efficiency of the DMV, writ large.
After five years of watching a President just going through the motions, Americans have seemingly had their fill. This is what excessive adulation can do to any celebrity -- especially when Americans realize they have been conned (to add to his election victories, selfies, magazine covers, Grammy, Nobel medal can be added his most recent "win"-the Lie of the year for his "you can keep your doctor" lie), The young have abandoned the man they elected. There are few things youth can tolerate and one of them is "inauthenticity." And Obama has that in abundance. He is, after all, in the words of Jeremiah Wright, Jr., just "a politician."
His poll numbers in five key categories are plummeting. Young people, so crucial to the success of ObamaCare, are ignoring his pitches to sign up and are tuning him out, as have America's adversaries.
Even Democratic politicians are wary of being connected to him as they face challenging reelection prospects.
He will continue bringing onto his team journalists (and their relatives) and spinners to peddle stories, travel through the country to attack Republicans and straw men, and pose false choices before ever-diminishing groups (see the end of Spinal Tap for a preview), have more pivots and fewer divots, but it all amounts to "noise" akin to Peanut's parents, repeating endlessly the same hackneyed phrases streamed to him from teleprompters.
Tens of millions of Americans have muted him -- as Nancy Pelosi so presciently did early in his presidency. Faux political leaders know one when they see one.
When Obama speaks they are "just words" and don't matter once they have served their purpose in fooling people -- they can be buried in the "memory hole" as was his faux "red line" regarding use of chemical weapons or explained away as the fault of Americans failure to understand "nuance" as apologists have been doing regarding his "doc promise". All clichés, all the time.
They are "empty words" from an empty man.
Obama is bored and so are we.
There are few people who are close to the notoriously insular Barack Obama (a former aide, Neera Tanden, said that "Obama doesn't call anyone, and he's not close to almost anyone. It's stunning that he's in politics, because he really doesn't like people") but Valerie Jarrett is among the select few. They have been friends for decades; she introduced Barack to Michelle; she is a constant presence in the White House, and highly unusual for a White House aide, enjoys her own Secret Service protective detail. And when she described Barack Obama as having been "bored to death his whole life" she helped explained what lies behind a failed presidency.
People familiar with Barack Obama's history realize he has a very low threshold for boredom. This is a trait shared by many millennials: they bore easily, and that character flaw is one reason employers refrain from hiring them. Yet they feel entitled to promotions as a way for others to display gratitude towards them and to give them an ego booster shot. They want to be stimulated and entertained all the time and find work tedious and...boring.
Obama's boredom began early.
When interviewed upon becoming the first black Harvard Law Review President he told the Associated Press, "I'm not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me"; by inference, suburbanites bore him, as well -- and we know how he feels about small-town Americans). Ah...to be jaded and judgmental so early in life and to feel free to spout stereotypes.
Upon graduating law school he went to work for a politically-connected Chicago law firm. But instead of grueling hours spent working on cases or contracts, his colleagues remember him as engaging in less boring and mundane pursuits -- his feet up on his desk, doodling on his memoir on company time. His fellow associates probably did not appreciate his attitude, but the name partners indulged him -- as one suspects he has been indulged throughout his life.
His boredom continued; he quickly grew bored with his state senate job (after all, voting present and relying on the work of others to make a name for oneself can induce ennui). This was a mere steppingstone on the way to greater electoral victory.
He parlayed the state senate job into becoming a United States Senator. How long did it take for that role to bore him? Not long at all, according to Game Change authors John Heilemann and Mark Halperin who wrote of his attitude towards being a Senator just one year:
The glacial pace, the endless procedural wrangling, the witless posturing and petifoggery, the geriatric cast of characters doddering around the place: all of it drove him nuts. To one friend in Chicago, Obama complained,
"It is basically the same as Springfield except the average age in Springfield is forty-two and in Washington it's sixty-two. Other than that, it's the same bullshit".
After listening to Biden during a committee hearing, Obama passed a note to Gibbs that read "Shoot me now".
Time and again after debates on the floor, he would emerge through the chamber's double doors shaking his head, rolling his eyes, using both hands to give the universal symbol for the flapping of gums, sighing wearily, "Yak, yak, yak".
He was angling for a bigger role.
There was a pattern becoming visible: throughout his career, Barack Obama has found work too mundane, too boring to bother spending time on. He was always looking for the excitement of the next campaign -- to be the star surrounded by adoring crowds and a press eager to sing his praises, a veritable choir. The only time he seemed to be exerting energy was when he was in front of roaring crowds (his political ascent into the stratosphere began at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where he delivered a keynote speech that sent the media swooning; he was in his element, boasting that "I'm Lebron, Baby. I can play on this level. I got some game".)
Image by Richard Terrell
After that display, it was off to the races and what followed was a narcissist's dream (the Denver faux columns, the faux Presidential seal, the faux presidency).There is a surfeit of examples of Obama's refusal to take his job with any degree of seriousness.
He has repeatedly refused to meet with economic experts, skipped more than half of his daily intelligence briefings, turned his Cabinet (trumpeted by an obedient media in 2009 as a Lincolnesque "Team of Rivals") into a Team of Idolizers that he almost completely ignores -- both as individuals and as a group; and , if one believes his protestations (a big "if") was out of the loop or, as Charles Krauthammer wrote, oblivious to the NSA, IRS, and AP scandals (as well as Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the vendetta against James Rosen at Fox News -- the list is endless). Of course, the most recent revelation is most revealing: even as he staked his reputation and legacy on his signature "achievement" (he called it his most important initiative) ObamaCare, he reportedly met only once with the official he chose to head the program, Kathleen Sebelius. Talk about being outside the beltway! Actually, that is where he can often be found: on the golf courses, on vacations, in front of adoring crowds, or shaking the money tree at glitzy fundraisers in Hollywood -- a natural environment for a faux president. A President has to set priorities after all.
When Americans were dying in Benghazi, he took the night off to rest for a trip to Las Vegas for a fundraiser to help his re-election efforts; when Americans were engaged in the mission to kill Bin Laden, he went to play cards with his body man. Those events were boring because they were not about him.
So when he has no clue about the real world (there were no "shovel-ready" jobs despite what he said when he pushed for a stimulus bill; "buying insurance" is actually complex -- one suspects he has never had to do it) or about the size of the national debt ( a topic of mirth not concern on the Letterman show ; or how taxes work; or how the economy works -- well, math is boring ; when Paul Ryan revealed how little, if anything, Obama knew about health care reform, entitlements, and the budget, Obama could not even fake a semblance of comprehension (now we know why he does not like news conferences and only appears on fluff shows where he knows he is in a Gotcha Question Free Zone); when he declared that the "private sector is doing fine"; when his advisers discuss the Syrian massacres in front of our Nobel Peace prize-winning President while he blithely ignores them as he spins through his BlackBerry (checking sports scores?) we should no longer be surprised. All those topics are so boring.
Americans should not be surprised that his decision-making has been reduced to a multiple choice sheet handed to him by his ring of advisers or that he is so slow in making decisions ("leading from behind" -- is there any American President who has proclaimed such a doctrine as a guiding principle?) ; or that he outsources decision-making to Vladimir Putin and the mad mullahs of Iran. Learning geopolitics --all those funny sounding names, all those groups, all those national security issues, maps, facts-boring. He outsources the work behind his goal of "fundamentally transforming America" to radicals he appoints and who now have an easy path to confirmation in the wake of Harry Reid's abolishing the venerable filibuster.
Contra to the sycophants who declared him the "smartest president" ever, or a "sort of god," he is not omniscient nor is he particularly bright. However, the flattery and obsequiousness has inflated an already outsized ego. Why would a god find mere mortals of interest? Obama admitted as much when he declared at a high-powered fundraiser that:
"It is very rare I come to an event where I'm like the fifth or sixth most interesting person.
No wonder he finds no time for experts and advisers but has plenty of time for pickup basketball games with NBA pros, glittering Hollywood celebrities, private concerts in the East Room of the White House. Everyone and everything else is so...boring. And he has no tolerance...or is actually rude...to people he finds boring . When Republicans and others, even donors hoping for a photo op, try to meet with him he considers it an act of lèse-majesté.
If he were interested in becoming a better president he would be forced to actually work, and he has a severe problem with the concept of work when it involves him and (perhaps) welfare recipients, as well He does not understand why businessmen and professionals would find his declaration that they did not "build that" offensive.
But to him work is boring.
He may be good enough for government work. No wonder he likes Big Government -- where else can someone with his attitude and work ethic rise so high? The administration operates with the efficiency of the DMV, writ large.
After five years of watching a President just going through the motions, Americans have seemingly had their fill. This is what excessive adulation can do to any celebrity -- especially when Americans realize they have been conned (to add to his election victories, selfies, magazine covers, Grammy, Nobel medal can be added his most recent "win"-the Lie of the year for his "you can keep your doctor" lie), The young have abandoned the man they elected. There are few things youth can tolerate and one of them is "inauthenticity." And Obama has that in abundance. He is, after all, in the words of Jeremiah Wright, Jr., just "a politician."
His poll numbers in five key categories are plummeting. Young people, so crucial to the success of ObamaCare, are ignoring his pitches to sign up and are tuning him out, as have America's adversaries.
Even Democratic politicians are wary of being connected to him as they face challenging reelection prospects.
He will continue bringing onto his team journalists (and their relatives) and spinners to peddle stories, travel through the country to attack Republicans and straw men, and pose false choices before ever-diminishing groups (see the end of Spinal Tap for a preview), have more pivots and fewer divots, but it all amounts to "noise" akin to Peanut's parents, repeating endlessly the same hackneyed phrases streamed to him from teleprompters.
Tens of millions of Americans have muted him -- as Nancy Pelosi so presciently did early in his presidency. Faux political leaders know one when they see one.
When Obama speaks they are "just words" and don't matter once they have served their purpose in fooling people -- they can be buried in the "memory hole" as was his faux "red line" regarding use of chemical weapons or explained away as the fault of Americans failure to understand "nuance" as apologists have been doing regarding his "doc promise". All clichés, all the time.
They are "empty words" from an empty man.
Obama is bored and so are we.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/12/our_bored_president.html#ixzz2nliddnw7
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Monday, December 16, 2013
There's Nothing at Stake Except the Future of Man by The Liberty Bard
A week from now, the Federal Reserve System will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founding. Resulting from secret negotiations between bankers and politicians at Jekyll Island, the Fed’s creation established a banking cartel and a board of government overseers that has grown ever stronger through the years. One would think this anniversary would elicit some sort of public recognition of the Fed’s growth from a quasi-agent of the Treasury Department intended to provide an elastic currency, to a de facto independent institution that has taken complete control of the economy through its central monetary planning. But just like the Fed’s creation, its 100th anniversary may come and go with only a few passing mentions.
Like many other horrible and unconstitutional pieces of legislation, the bill which created the Fed, the Federal Reserve Act, was passed under great pressure on December 23, 1913, in the waning moments before Congress recessed for Christmas with many Members already absent from those final votes. This underhanded method of pressuring Congress with such a deadline to pass the Federal Reserve Act would provide a foreshadowing of the Fed’s insidious effects on the US economy—with actions performed without transparency.
Ostensibly formed with the goal of preventing financial crises such as the Panic of 1907, the Fed has become increasingly powerful over the years. Rather than preventing financial crises, however, the Fed has constantly caused new ones. Barely a few years after its inception, the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy to help fund World War I led to the Depression of 1920. After the economy bounced back from that episode, a further injection of easy money and credit by the Fed led to the Roaring Twenties and to the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in American history.
But even though the Fed continued to make the same mistakes over and over again, no one in Washington ever questioned the wisdom of having a central bank. Instead, after each episode the Fed was given more and more power over the economy. Even though the Fed had brought about the stagflation of the 1970s, Congress decided to formally task the Federal Reserve in 1978 with maintaining full employment and stable prices, combined with constantly adding horrendously harmful regulations. Talk about putting the inmates in charge of the asylum!
Now we are reaping the noxious effects of a century of loose monetary policy, as our economy remains mired in mediocrity and utterly dependent on a stream of easy money from the central bank. A century ago, politicians failed to understand that the financial panics of the 19th century were caused by collusion between government and the banking sector. The government’s growing monopoly on money creation, high barriers to entry into banking to protect politically favored incumbents, and favored treatment for government debt combined to create a rickety, panic-prone banking system. Had legislators known then what we know now, we could hope that they never would have established the Federal Reserve System.Today, however, we do know better. We know that the Federal Reserve continues to strengthen the collusion between banks and politicians. We know that the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy continues to reap profits for Wall Street while impoverishing Main Street. And we know that the current monetary regime is teetering on a precipice. One hundred years is long enough. End the Fed.
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